Microsoft's new security suite drawing generally positive reviews, especially for the price
Friday, October 2, 2009
While major commercial anti-viruses cost $60 or $70 per year for the software and continuous updates, Microsoft Security Essentials doesn't cost a dime. Experts say that this could be a game-changing development in the field of anti-virus software.
Early reviews indicate that MSE stacks up reasonably well against its for-pay competitors, earning average to strong reviews in most areas. Andreas Marx, of online anti-virus software tester AV-Test told the New York Times that, while MSE did not perform effective "dynamic detection" of cutting-edge malware samples, neither did much of the competition.
MSE is said to perform particularly well against rootkits, which are subtle pieces of malicious code that hide themselves and other malware programs from conventional anti-virus detection. The program itself is relatively small compared to its competitors, in part because many of the features of conventional security suites are built-in to Windows.
Some of the competition is not happy with the Redmond giant's newest release. Mike Plante, writing for Symantec's Norton Protection Blog, says that "MSE appears to be nothing more than a bad rerun of Microsoft’s infamous history of offering consumers incomplete and ineffective protection."
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